Taihu Tatlers: Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade

Abstract

From its inception in the seventeenth century, the Royal Society was no friend to poetry. The advancement of the new science, in the view of its champions, required the subordination of language to empirical observation, the unequivocal homage of inconstant words to the unchanging nature of things in themselves. Poets, needless to say, took a dim view of this development, as they staked their livelihood on the very malleability of language that the empiricists condemned. Satire provided sweet revenge: a team of scholars encountered by Swift’s Gulliver during his visit to the Academy of Lagado make themselves ridiculous by taking Thomas Sprat’s denunciations of figurai language at face value. Rather than risk the ambiguity and semantic slippage attendant on verbal expression, they have dispensed with words altogether and taken to communicating entirely with things, a collection of which they carry about with them in a handy satchel for deployment at academic meetings and cocktail parties.¹